Category Archives: Evils of Liberalism

While the Department of the Interior has been in the news for some fairly ridiculous reasons lately, that does not undermine the fact that it is unquestionably one of the worst uses of government power in D.C. which is actively working every day to keep Americans in poverty and hurt the economy.

Born of an era before we had executive level offices that were not necessarily under a cabinet department, the Department of the Interior was originally conceived of a place to stick all the internal brick-a-brack that didn’t really belong in other departments but were federal government domestic issues. Most of the things originally put in this department (like the Patent office) no longer are in the Department of the Interior. And what is left is utterly useless.

And we need to address this issue first because unlike most of the problems in the Department which boil down to give it to the states or sell it to the private sector and close the offices, this disaster of a longstanding government travesty has more intricacies given how deeply we have screwed over, and more importantly how deeply we are screwing them over this very minute, this one group.

Before you ask, yes we are going to get rid of every bit of this god-awful department, but just closing it isn’t the way to do it.

I propose to the following actions
Every Native American currently getting checks from the government just for existing will get a lump sum check equivalent to ten years worth of payments, this should give them an appropriate buffer to either do things they never were able to do on the dole (like get an education and job skills, which sadly is all to often a story on the Res.) or to invest in their own future even if they are already leading a productive life. As much as I hate welfare you can’t cut people off cold turkey and expect them to thrive…but given the particular evil of this department I don’t trust a slow step down either—so lump sum payment and we’re done with that.

At the same time everyone living on the reservation will get a half acre of land put in their name.

All other reservation land will be given to a corporation in the name of the tribe. Members of the tribe living on the reservation will get 1000 shares, those not living on the reservation but still recognized as members of the tribe get 500 (numbers are of course up for debate, but I understand tribal benefits for many tribes already follow this or similar models). So everyone now has land in their own name and the rest of the land is held by a corporation.
Thus they can now get loans, use the land and houses as collateral, invest, develop and generally work to improve their own lives with all the same rights that all other Americans (seriously it is just disgusting how we do not grant basic property rights to this one group). (And personally I wouldn’t mind giving large plots of other federal land to the reservations to also be included in their corporate holdings, they will almost certainly take care of it and make more money off it than the government ever could). Every reservation will then be incorporated as its own county and thus will only have to deal with state and federal governments. Finally all the casinos will be granted 100 year grandfather clauses from state government interference (I don’t like getting involved in state issues like that, but no need to further screw over the tribes, 100 years is more than enough time to find some other source of income or come to some understanding with the states they reside in). The casinos will of course go to the ownership of the tribe’s corporation.
From there they are free to win or lose based on the laws of free enterprise and capitalism. That much property should be a good head start, but this way from this point forward they would be treated not differently than any other American (seriously how has the government not stopped treating them as second class citizens yet..how was this never part of any Civil Right’s movement?) Then you won’t have moments like the government getting to decide if land the tribe considers sacred will be used for mining ) (although my suspicion is that if they were actually making money from a lease of the land personally, like most rational folk profit is very sacred).

Okay here’s an easy one. Just give the land and responsibilities of these over to the states. I’m fairly certain someone in Phoenix has a better idea of how to take care of the Grand Canyon than someone in D.C. So that goes for every federal park. The f

Yes in California, a place where there is a drought, where serious water rationing is in place, where water is at a premium…the government is forcing people to dump over a trillion gallons of water into the ocean to save a useless fish. I’m sorry but the destruction of billions of dollars in agriculture (and the relating economic benefit) is clearly more important than a damn fish that no one but the US government cares about.

US Geology Survey, Bureau of Land Reclamation, Bureau of Mining Reclamation
If these serve any purpose, which is doubtful, it’s something the states can handle at probably half the price.

Office of Insular Affairs
This office actually does need to be kept around since they’re the management of all those territories we still have (which is a federal issue). But it can go on as an executive office, you don’t need a whole department for it.

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
These are the geniuses who told B.P that drilling close to the shore was dangerous and you have to drill further out in the ocean for it to be safe.
Yeah they’re useless.

And finally we get to the problem we’ve been hearing about so often lately

Bureau of Land Management

247.3 million acres.
That’s how much land BLM has. One-eighth of the US.
Most of that land isn’t park land, it’s grazing land, it’s land with resources, it’s land that could be sold either to the states or the private sector for a huge profit (didn’t we have a debt we needed to pay off?)

There is no reason for the government to own any of that! There is barely a reason that states should own this land.This land needs to be sold off. Granted many people depend on this land for their livelihood and I have no problem with offering them to buy the land they have been leasing at whatever the market place for such undeveloped land is…but if they don’t want to buy it the land needs to go up for auction—probably over the course of a few years as putting that much land on the market at once would collapse all prices, but the government does not need to own this land. And not only because there is no reason for the government to own it…but because as with all things, they’re losing money on it. Only the federal government can charge people to use land that just sits there and requires little to no upkeep other than what nature provides or what people will pay you to do and still lose money on it.

We don’t need to get into how unbelievably corrupt and inept and inept the people at BLM are because they shouldn’t exist in the first place. Even if they weren’t mentally challenged sociopaths they still shouldn’t exist so their extensive laundry list of moral and intellectual failings is a moot point (unless you want to throw them all in jail, which I’m okay with, but first sell the land and close the office). As a quick intermediary we can just sell the land to the states, but the federal control has to be ended now.

As the lead Federal agency responsible for the protection and sound development of the nation’s natural resources, the Department of the Interior has a special obligation to be a leader in energy management and conservation. As such, bureaus and offices across the Department are committed to conserving energy and water resources, eliminating waste, increasing renewable energy use, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts by optimizing the use of energy efficient and water conserving technologies. Bureaus and offices are also striving to incorporate energy efficiency, water conservation, and sustainable practices into the decision-making processes during the planning, design, acquisition, renovations, operations and maintenance of buildings. The Office of Acquisition and Property Management (PAM) coordinates these important Department-wide efforts.

And what in the history of the US Government makes you think that they’re in any way competent to do any of that?
Yeah close this boondoggle as well.

So again, we have a terrible organization that needs to have every single one of its responsibilities either privatized, sent to the states or just ended.

“Freedom is life’s great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart, you will know peace.”—Not Bernie Sanders but you’d be hard pressed to find a place where he disagrees with this idea.

So I’m sure we’re all tired of Bernie and his cult of stupid praising equality. They’re quite an illiterate bunch. I call them illiterate because if he had ever picked up a book he might have had the chance to see the obvious evil of equality. Bradbury, Huxley, Orwell, and of course most beautifully Vonnegut in “Harrison Bergeron” show the clear dehumanizing nature of equality. Further these idiots have clearly been living in caves as I know everything from The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek back in the day to episodes of the Simpsons—not to mention a slew of movies have also dealt with how equality is really a terrible thing (and I mean movies of quality not just whatever the latest teen dystopia is). But for those of you who might not be sure why I’m suggesting equality is terrible let me explain.

As an English teacher by day I like to make sure we all have the same definition going in when we discuss something, so let us begin with a quick definition:

equality: noun, the state of being equal, esp. in status, rights, and opportunities

But that really doesn’t help us now does it? Except in giving us the idea that things that have equality are essentially the same thing. This is why we have to break down equality into lots of different categories such as potential, rights, under the law, access to opportunities, abilities, and results. (Yeah I’m going to cover all of those.)

Now not all equality is bad, because in many ways we are perfectly equal. For instance we are all equal in our potential. We all have the potential to reach into that part of ourselves that is part of God. In a more immediate sense we all have the potential to make our lives, and possibly this world, a better place than we found it (but again not everyone lives up to that potential).

We are equal in our natural rights. By definition we are beings with bodies, reason, free will, and souls. Because we have bodies we have the right to life, because without that right we could not use any of those other things we have. Because we have reason and free will we all have the right to liberty so long as it does not infringe upon the liberty of anyone else. Because we have souls we not only have a right but a moral obligation to pursue our Happiness because that is what we are made for. Wrapped up in the pursuit of Happiness while in this world is liberty but also the right to property to see the effort of our labor made manifest. We are all equal in these rights. No one has a greater natural right to liberty than another…although if you prove to be a danger to those around you, for the safety of everyone you can lose your right to liberty.

And because of the nature of government it must be enforced that we are all equal under the law. That the writing and enforcement of the law cannot, must not, favor one group over another. If we didn’t enforce strict equality under the law (which by the way we don’t with such wonderful ethical violations as Affirmative Action, and the DOJ’s current racist enforcement of voting rights laws) the system would be by definition corrupt.

And then there is this tricky one about access to opportunities. This is where equality stops. When conservatives and libertarians talk about equal access to opportunity they are speaking about something we are all equal in regards to. We all have a right to seek opportunities that will lead to our happiness, and while we don’t have this in real life because of the government, we do have the natural right to seek any job, any profession, any piece of property and try to achieve them. However, since we do not have a right to getting these things, only the equal right to pursue getting them, some of us will not achieve our pursuit. And in this respect individuals are not equal. Some will find success/happiness in the opportunities, some will not. And that is a fact of reality.

These are all things we are equal in because they all deal with potential. We all have these rights to do things as we choose, but notice nothing is guaranteed to us; we have to work for every end. Only means are rights not ends.*

Liberals, however, when they mention equality of opportunity they think of something else. They think of the evil which I spoke of in the first paragraph. When they say everyone should have access to the same opportunities, they don’t think with the addendum that conservatives do “so long as you have worked for them.” Do you want to have a pay check, a better job, a life-style where you can take 2 months, or a year off? Conservatives want you to have those things, so long as you work for them. Liberals just want to skip that little work point and just say you should have the opportunity to live that kind of life. To hell with whether you’ve earned it.

And that’s the problem with equality of results. It denies that people have to earn things; that they just have to be given things. And while the pragmatic problem is that when a government gives people things you have to steal them from others which is evil in and of itself, it reduces the incentives to actually produce. This is why communist and socialist nations produce less, because there is no incentive to produce more–only capitalism produces that. Don’t believe me, look at pictures of any Soviet breadline, then, go take a look at how many types of bread you have to choose from at the local Safeway.

But aside from the pragmatics that guaranteeing equality of results doesn’t work there is an inherent evil in equality of ends. First off people are not equal. One person is smarter, one stronger, one a better painter, one a great accountant, another a great teacher, another a great writer, another a great parent. People have different talents. Most of have two or three things we’re good at. A rare few are exceptional in multiple fields. A rare few are gifted in almost nothing. But each of us has different skills. Now while we all have our purpose on this Earth, it does not mean all of us will fulfill that to our fullest potential. And to treat everyone as if their gifts were all the same is to deny that which makes us good. To say we all get paid the same, or have equal rights to healthcare, states that your gifts and talents and efforts and character are worth the same as the most talentless, ungifted, lazy jerk. And that’s exactly what equality of ends is endorsing. It says that the most pathetic excuse of a human being is worth the same as you. It is to say that the person who has turned their back on making the world a better place should receive the same as the person who strives to use all their gifts to their fullest potential. It is to say that there is no difference between those who choose the best in ourselves and work to that end and those who fall to the worst in ourselves and work to no end but destruction.

You cannot bring the worst of us up to the level of the best of us unless they choose to bring themselves up to that level. Thus to say that everyone, without qualification, deserves the same payment, healthcare, means you deserve the same rewards, healthcare, place in society. Equality says you are worth no more than the most lazy, illogical, uneducated person in the world. Is that right? No it’s evil. Only by embracing the best within us and rewarding that, do we acknowledge that there is a difference between the best and worst within us. (And you’ll notice that those best among us then offer more opportunities through personal charity to others to let them shine as well). The only way to establish equality is to destroy those of skill and gifts because otherwise they would be a reminder to those who do not have those skills and gifts that they are not equal (go read Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”)…equality means that no one should be more special than any other or shine out from the crowd (go read Huxley’s Brave New World)…it means you cannot exercise your liberty because the full use of liberty means you might be different and better (go read 1984). Equality in the way liberals mean it is slavery.

Yes we need equality under the law, equality of rights, equality to pursue our dreams because we are humans. But that which makes us human allows us to progress at different rates, which by definition means an inequality of results. And to go against that is to go against what makes us human. It is an evil that denies the best within us.

*Liberals will of course bring up handicaps here. Guess what real handicaps didn’t stop Keller, Hawking, or Reeves, humans have potential because of their soul and their brain and for the vast majority of people with handicaps we have no problem making legitimate accommodations when people legitimately have something that is out of the norm that might offer a small stumbling block to them demonstrating the full potential of their mind. As for mental handicaps, well we as a society take care of those who literally can’t take care of themselves—it’s an incredibly small group and this minuscule exception doesn’t actually challenge the idea of rights and equality of opportunity being more important than equality of results.

What do you do with a problem like ISIS? You kill them. Every last one of them. Quickly swiftly, with as little collateral damage as is possible, but with the knowledge that collateral damage is still less than what they would have been killed. And then you go back in and rebuild the bombed out areas and keep them under control until the people are ready to rule themselves, no matter how much time, money, and lives that takes.

This could have been prevented…and long term there are solutions, but we need a leader willing to do something and intelligent enough to think long-term.

However to do this you would need a commander-in-chief who was capable of accurately judging a situation and had the spine necessary to see the plan through. You would need advisers who could see long term, project the numerous problems that would occur, plan to deal with them, and have back up plans to those plans. You would need a legislature that would be willing to also see long term and put the good of humanity above petty gain and if necessary put their political futures in jeopardy to do what is right. And allied nations that believe the same would also be nice.

I don’t think we’ve had that in a very, very long time. We might have had a good C-in-C around occasionally, even a few with good advisers…but I can’t think of the last time we had everything you would actually need working all together.

Now we could assign blame…Carter for allowing the Westernization of Iran and Afghanistan to stop and both nations to fall to religious lunatics and communist butchers respectively (really this is all Carter’s fault, had he had anything resembling a spine or a brain none of this would ever have happened). One could blame Reagan for keeping the psychos in Iran busy with another enemy and repeatedly bloodying the nose of Soviets in Afghanistan…were mistakes made, but unlike everyone else on this list he made significant strides in pushing the forces of evil back (strides that could have been kept if the next four idiots had half a brain between them, sadly they don’t). If Bush the elder had a foreign policy I’d be surprised—there was some lingering Reagan in his understanding of needing to get Saddam out of Kuwait, but his isolationist tendencies predominated over his complete inability to think that something might need to be done after pushing him back to the border. Clinton did his best to ignore everything. W. wanted to be an isolationist like daddy, however 12 years of morons finally came to a head, and isolationism wasn’t exactly a sound policy on 9/12 (it isn’t ever a sound policy, but even idiot isolationists have a problem maintaining that when there are that many dead). The problem is that while he seemed to understand you need to face evil and kill it, he didn’t understand the second part of neo-conservatism—that you have to rebuild the nation that you’re going into and maintain control until they can continue on their own in the correct direction.

Even if you are the dumbest president ever…how do you just sit there when this is going on?

So let’s boil this down to 4 sets of problems: being busy somewhere else with bigger problems (Reagan), not dealing with anything (Carter, Bush 41, Clinton), and doing something but doing it badly. The 4th would of course be called full on retreat and arming the bad guys…I can’t think of who might have committed that sin—cough—Obama—cough—

So while I blame Carter most of all for not doing anything and preventing decades (possibly a century) let’s focus on where W. went wrong as he was the only one who directly acted on these problems. More importantly it’s what he didn’t do, and what we should still do (as anyone who thinks we can avoid ever going back there is crazy).*

1. The first thing we should have done was we should not try to keep people together who don’t want to be together. The borders of Iraq are so arbitrary and haphazard I just can’t imagine what the hell was going through the mind of British politicians after WWI when they broke up the region. Iraq should be at least three nations: Kurdistan in the north, what is traditionally called the Sunni Triangle, we could give it the name Babylon, and a Shia nation in the south let’s still call it Iraq. If you want it might be a good idea to have a 4th nation, let’s call it Mesopotamia, for all the areas in there that aren’t majority, Shia, Sunni, or Kurd.

Now some would say that creating Kurdistan would have angered Iran and Turkey (and a few others). Is this really an argument? As if those nations love us so much. Who cares about them? Kurdistan would actually provide a large buffer state (with some mild loyalty to the US) in between a lot of other nations.

The goal should be to create nations that can be self-sufficient and seek to actually keep themselves together, not just to keep the maps the same. Breaking Iraq in to 3 or 4 nations would have made each nation more stable, less likely to breed internal strife and hatred and with each nation first and foremost seeking to keep its own autonomy rather than looking for outside help to swing control away from parts of the nation they didn’t agree with.

We should all remember that before we were a nation we were 13 states, and those states only came together under a single constitution when they saw it was in their own best interest. Forcing different nations together into one government doesn’t work unless they want to join together (notice the failure of the EU—it should have made Europe stronger as a whole, but their inept behavior and the arm-twisting methods of trying to force their rule on Europe is just backfiring).

2. Build walls.

I think we have learned the hard way in this country that you need walls on a border. When it comes to nations good fences make for good neighbors. If we put up a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, just watch how fast Mexico would get their act together as they would no longer have a release valve for all their disgruntled citizens. And it is even more so the case in Iraq.
If we had built walls—and I do mean walls, not fences, something big enough to stop both people and large military movements—between Iraq and all its neighbors (especially Iran and Syria) we first off would not have been dealing with years of Iran sending terrorists across the border to destabilize the nation. And had we built a real wall at the Syrian border we would not have seen ISIS move in to Iraq so easily. Even more so if we had broken the nation up and built walls between the other nations.

3. We learned from the aftermath of WWI that you can’t just leave a nation after you defeat them, you have to rebuild them (Obama being functionally retarded seems to have never learned this). And from our successes post-WWII we learned that this is not a quick fix project. It takes time to rebuild a nation. I have said this numerous times on this blog, but it bears repeating. You can’t have a nation under the rule of tyranny for decades; then have a war to remove that tyranny and then just expect everything to be all well and good within a year.

It takes time. It takes time to rebuild infrastructure. Roads. Water systems. Electricity. Communications. Hospitals and schools. Court systems and police. And it takes years of supervision to make sure they know what they’re doing and to instill into a people the traditions of a democratic republic. You can’t just hand it off in a year. It just doesn’t magically appear…and to think that is crazy. And to all the racists out there who like to say well Arabs aren’t fit for democracy (usually they use the phrase “that part of the world” but it’s the same racism). Bullshit. Anyone who says that conveniently forgets that with generations of experience with democratic institutions it took over a decade of failure and near constant threat of failure and revolt before we got a Constitution and government that actually worked. It was complete mess between the signing of the Declaration and the ratification of the Constitution…I know everyone forgets this little point, but it can’t be forgotten. We also didn’t have a clue as to what we were doing at first. It takes time, and between Bush and Obama rushing out with over eagerness and turning the place over to the Iraqi’s (and Afghani’s) far to quickly. And that is entirely unforgivable for both of them.

4. You can’t deal with bad people by being nice to them. You can’t just let them go and expect them suddenly not to be vicious psychopaths. Bush let all of the captured Iraqi army go without properly vetting them, and Obama will trade major terrorists for treasonous scum at the drop of a hat. We should have kept the entire Iraqi army under lock and key until we had the chance to vet each and every one of them, and the terrorists in Guantanamo should rot there until they’re dead. If you have a problem with that you clearly have no ability to see that long term terrorists are going to present you with three options, they kill you or other innocent people, you kill them or you imprison them.

5. We have to admit that this childish attitude of “It’s not our problem” is suicidal. It will always become our problem. Tyranny never stops growing until it is stopped by an outside force. The idiots who now want to let Iran handle this are absolutely clueless. In an Iran vs. ISIS battle the result is the same, the winner winds up with Iran’s nuclear technology and the sense that God is on their side. That danger far outweighs whatever short-term benefits might be gained by having these two groups kill each other. And whatever is left after that battle will have no opposition to stop them from spreading out of the Middle East…and no matter who wins it will be bad news for Israel and the U.S. The intelligent move is to deal with this long before it gets to us.

6. We can’t do anything right now. Because to do what needs to be done will require a leader with brains, ethics, and a spine. Obama has none of those. What it requires is a leader who can look at the bodies of 10,000 soldiers coming home and not see his falling poll numbers but rather how the 10,000 now prevented it from being 10,000,000 innocents later (Bush failed miserably at that). And right now at most I can only expect Obama to root for ISIS or Iran to win and then conquer America because he sure as hell does not have the interest of this nation at heart. So until we can get a real leader (and a Congress that can back them up) this is only a theoretical discussion. The other issue is the cost to a nation tremendously in debt with no real sight of turning that around in the near future – this also requires a leader who understand economics so that we can push forward for ourselves and then do the we can stand for what is right.

But that theoretical discussion has to be made and it has to always end with the U.S. and its allies always pushing back on tyranny, always making sure to take the time and effort to build functioning democracies, and always looking toward the long-term…because if you think Iraq or Afghanistan was expensive this time, just remember that until we solve this, these will be problems that keep drawing us back again and again and again, and it isn’t even naïve to think otherwise, it’s pathetic and below the level of thought you should feel comfortable demonstrating in public.

*Not to mention the fact that most of this is a good answer in dealing with any dictator in any part of the world.

It’s always a little sad when a publication or web site you otherwise respect and trust starts publishing drivel. Regrettably such was the case over at the RealClear websites when they published (not just linked, but published) an article preposterously entitled, “Religion didn’t kill science in the Middle East” And while I tend to just ignore most historical revisionism as something utterly not worth my time, this article not only justifies the anti-intellectual attitudes that run through the “religion of peace” but it completely dismisses historical truth.

The article does correctly point out that at a certain point in history—the article conveniently says between the 9th and 13th centuries (I’ll come back to these dates)—the Islamic world was the height of civilization in terms of science and mathematics. This was the era that saw the invention of Algebra, and advances in chemistry, medicine, and astronomy. Okay so far. Then the author goes onto to point out why Islam began falling behind: like most historical revisionists he blames the Crusades in the 11th century and Columbus in the 15th century (easy punching bags for every lightweight pseudo-intellectual hack) as things that hurt the Islamic world, it’s ability to trade (and with it the prosperity to allow a culture to indulge in scientific research). Ridiculously, Genghis Khan and the fact that you can’t put Arabic into a printing press are also blamed.

The problem with all of this – the reasons given for the decline of scientific research were was in fact in decline before a Crusader ever set foot in the Middle East. In fact if we look at Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 we find that there is not a single major scientific advancement to come out of the Arabic world after 1025.* In fact we not only see scientific advancement disappear from the map but even art. Literature in the Islamic world goes from a massive output of quality work that still stands the test of time, to almost nothing past 1050**. As the First Crusade started in 1096 (and all the other points the author brought up occurred after that) I find it very hard to blame any of them for the death of intellectual output in the Muslim world which seemed to happen at least 50 years before that. It also seems to be very disingenuous of the author of the article to say the scientific achievements continued until the 13th century when really they died off in the 11th…it’s as if he picked a date that allowed him to blame the Crusades, to hell if it had no relation to facts.

Also if it was only the lack of prosperity and constant conflict that was the cause of the death of science in the Middle East…Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Qatar, are all rolling in cash and have been fairly stable (by standards of the region they’re incredibly stable) yet at best we’re seeing them use the resources of Western intellect instead of breaking new ground. Something seems to ring very false. And if the argument of the article is false, is Islam and it’s core teachings to blame?

So what really killed the science in the Islamic World? Well the answer to that can be found in one simple name: Aristotle. In the 750’s the Abbasid Caliphate took control of the Islamic Empire and with them came a branch of Sunni Islam called Mu’tazilism (don’t be too shocked you haven’t ever heard of them, they’re all dead). The Mu’tazilites were the branch of Islam that actually bothered to read the works of the Ancient Greeks when the Islamic armies conquered all the cities in their new Empire. And there they found Aristotle, a man who wrote about physics, psychology, politics, ethics, biology, metaphysics…who held reason and logic as the guiding light for all of human existence. Despite the fact that Islam was never too hot on reason*** the common sense nature of Aristotle won out with Mu’tazilites who decided that reason not blind unthinking faith needed to be the guiding light. And for a couple centuries they were guiding force of culture (or at least a force in the 10th and 11th century) that you saw the major output and advances in mathematics, science, literature, and art. However in 1063 (you know around the time when everything stopped), as stated in The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert R. Reilly,

“Nizam al-Mulk, the power vizier to Seljuk sultan Alp-Arslan, had the curses [against the Ash’arites] stopped. According to British Islam scholar W. Montgomery Watt, al-Muk also ‘began to implement a policy of supporting and strengthening the Ash’arites against the other theological and legal schools.’”

Who are the Ash’arites? They’re pretty much the archenemies of the Mu’tazilites (you may not know the name Ash’arite, but you’re more than familiar with their attitudes). They believe in faith as the only guide and reason as merely hubris.

They believed in following the Koran without interpretation, just following what it said. Their most famous scholar al-Ghazali published a book The Incoherence of Philosophy which among other things set out to destroy the usefulness of reason at anytime in any place for any purpose. Sharia Law is a direct outgrowth of Ash’arite belief. As the Ash’areites

It is the presence of the ideas of these two that creates scientific and cultural prosperity…it their lack which causes stagnation. This is true not just in the Middle East, but the world over.

came into power they not only challenged the Mu’tazilites, they had them killed and their works burned. And low and behold when this belief came into power, the intellectual output of Islam just dried up over night. Amazing how when you deny reason the fruits of reason disappear. All the advancement that apologist like to talk about for the Golden Age of Islam came from the time when the Mu’tazilites, who downplayed religion, were in power.

So is religion to blame? Yes, yes it is. Because the fact is that while my sympathies will always be for the Mu’tazilites I can also admit they were terrible Muslims. A good portion of Mu’tazilite writing is trying to explain away the contradictions between reason and Koran. The Bible starts with a statement that God gave man dominion over Earth (thus it might be intelligent to know what goes on here), praises intellect, and implies that the reason and free will of God exists in the human soul. All of this matches up very well with Aristotle…which is why St. Thomas Aquinas found it so easy to graft Aristotle onto Christianity in the 1300’s (you know right before the time that science and research were coming back into style in Europe). The Mu’tazilites had to do everything but outright deny the Koran to prop up the common sense reason of Aristotle. The Koran dismisses reason, allows for no room for free will or even the laws of physics as everything occurs by the will of Allah (you roll your pen off the table, it falls, according to Ash’arties it fell not because of gravity because there is no such thing…it fell because Allah willed it to fall, the god of Ash’arism is the micro-manager to an infinite degree…things seem to fall at a constant rate of 32 feet per second per second not because of laws of physics, but because God is a creature of habit)… please go read The Closing of the Muslim Mind if you think this is just my interpretation. Right, wrong, or indifferent, religious liberty aside, Islam is a religion that at its core is dead set against the mind/reason/logic. Other religions are more ambivalent, you can find evidence supporting faith and evidence supporting reason, but no sides come out a winner, but in Islam, and especially the Ash’arite interpretation which is still in fashion, reason always loses to faith…in fact there isn’t even a contest.

And it should be noted that while other religions don’t make it as hard to work with it is the Aristotelean spirit that drives culture and science to thrive. Now it may be as the author argues in The Cave and the Light that it is the battle between Aristotle and Plato that drives civilization and that even when you have too much Aristotle things get a little stagnant…be in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Human Accomplishment, The Cave and the Light or the recently released The History of the Renaissance World: From the rediscovery of Aristotle to the conquest of Constantinople if you are going to judge what drives civilization to improve it is Aristotle. And the RealClear article which tries to free Islam of blame by ignoring what caused the growth of the Islamic world and how it was religion that got rid of the works of Aristotle, is intellectually baseless, trying only to relieve the only religion liberalism actually likes of it’s participation in hurting the advancement of civilization.

*There is one major figure in the field of medicine from the 1200’s but I think it’s safe to say his work in medicine was due to the Crusades more than hurt by them.

**It should also be noted that until the modern era the vast majority of literature that came from the Islamic world came from Sufi writers. The charges I make against Islam later in the article almost never apply the Sufism which philosophically does little more than pay lip service to the core tenets of Islam.

***The problem is this. In Islam there is no story that God made man in his own image, in fact the Koran states that nothing can be compared to Allah (112:1-4) and if we lack in the image (usually interpreted to be will and intellect) in common what good are those things in us, and unlike the Bible which in the old Testament praises Solomon for his intellect and the Gospel of John states “In the beginning was Reason, and Reason was with God and Reason was God.” (yes, that’s a more correct translation than what you’re used to reading)…there are no such lines praising reason and logic in the Koran, only faith. Blind, unthinking, unquestioning faith.

Exclusive, The Conservative New Ager has, this April Fool’s Day, been shown recently uncovered documents that show conclusively that the Republican Party has been infiltrated by liberal moles hell-bent on destroying the Republican Party from within.

What’s this you say? Liberal infiltrators within the Republican Party? Yes!

And no I’m not just referring to the fact that liberals have been heavily funding “libertarian” candidates to divide votes against conservatives. No the plan appears, according to these documents, to go much further (beginning with the open push for open primaries – we now see the underlying liberal reasoning).

While the documents do not list exactly who is involved or where money is being funneled to, the plans and tactics for the double agents are laid out clearly. For instance, one document states:

Liberal infiltrators are to always bring up abortion. Polls show that while Americans are not in favor of the Democratic position of abortion on demand at tax payer expense, the natural American tendency toward liberty finds it even more offensive to claim “”If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”. Gallup studies have shown that despite claims otherwise, 71% of Republicans favor keeping abortion legal in one form or another…yet a vocal minority within the Republican party, which these documents show are on liberal payrolls, are hammering a point that in no way appeals even to the base of the Republican party and certainly not to the majority of voters. Further these documents suggest that DNC forces have also paid off the media to only cover these infiltrators which explain why the media gives these comments so much play and not real fiscal comments from the Republican Party. These liberal infiltrators have started even attacking what the vast majority of Republicans and independents believe is a valid purpose of abortion, aborting children with severe medical challenges to spare them the living hell of a

Hmmm….

life like that. Further these liberal infiltrators are being paid to make Republicans look mentally challenged by suggesting that abortion is the cause of our economic woes with truly brain dead statements like “The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies ends in abortion.” Quotes this insane assumes that conservatives believe that children have one purpose – to support the elderly – which if that isn’t the ring of liberal propaganda then what is… there is nothing there about the conservative beliefs in individualism, personal responsibility and freedom of choice – whatever those repercussions are.

These documents were obtained in light of the fact that despite being a traitor worthy of hanging for his crimes, Edward Snowden did reveal what liberals consider data security. The field agents of the Conservative New Ager just strolled into the DNC headquarters and asked for access to the computer systems claiming to be tech people called in to repair an unspecified problem. The stoned hippie behind the desk was apparently more than helpful in providing our investigative team with all the documents they needed.

As such deep cover agents have been sent into the Republican Party to pose as conservatives, they work tirelessly to offend moderates and even Republicans as liberals are desperate to get votes for themselves or at least deprive Republicans of votes by having those voters veer towards the perpetual waste of a vote known as the Libertarian party.

In addition to the abortion issues, similar DNC drafted talking points for these infiltrators include making statements against gay marriage (when the majority of moderate and even conservative voters would rather you just get government out of religion and just have legal civil unions for everyone) or focusing on other issues that any idiot would know would not drive moderates away.

It is unclear exactly who in the Democrat Party came up with this plan and who is funding it (or even that anyone at the DNC could possibly have the foresight to think up something this clever)…or who in the Republican Party was too stupid to not notice what was going on. But as insiders begin to comb over the paperwork it becomes clear that this is the only thing keeping the Democratic Party alive as the Republicans would sway the vast majority of independents and libertarians if they were just running on conservative economic values.

Documents do not make it clear exactly who these people are but there are clues within the paperwork. For instance one such infiltrator is listed as a former Governor who during their term of office threatened violate contract law (something conservatives hold as sacrosanct) with contracts the state held with private corporations, raised taxes on those corporations, encouraged large federal spending projects to nowhere, advocated that the budget to the Department of Education be expanded, endorses the worst candidates (even liberal scum) whenever possible, and takes government subsidy money for their TV shows. One wonders how moderates could be so dumb to accept such a clearly vile liberal shill as a conservative, but you betcha they are just that dumb.

Other infiltrators are suggested to have endorsed arming al-Qaeda in Syria. One even appears to be a massive closet case who never met a government spending program or bribe he didn’t like.

To spot these liberal infiltrators according to these documents, the following positions should be noticed:

(1) They make wild baseless claims about abortion rather than just pushing to end all government funding of it.

(2) They believe that gay marriage is an abomination rather than the conservative belief that government should get out religion, and only do civil unions for any two consenting adults leaving marriage to religion and religion alone.

(3) They attack other Republicans.

(4) They treat conservatism as a belief that can only exist within Christianity despite the fact that the moral basis for conservatism can be found in just about every religion on Earth.

(5) They attack corporations as something inherently evil or do not hold other basic conservative/capitalist views like the sacrosanct nature of contracts – personal property rights.

(6) They speak in terms of populism accidentally dropping liberal talking points like “living wage” or feel that competition is a bad thing.

(7) Having no understanding of the difference between the idiotic federal Race to the Top (Obama’s plan) and the intelligent state led Common Core standards and treating them as if they’re the same thing.

It is almost certain that anyone who traffics in statements like this is clearly on the DNC payroll and following their direction/talking points.

When informed of this GOP chair Reince Preibus stated that, “When you think about it this actually makes sense. I mean the only other option would be that the Republican Party was laced with absolutely suicidal morons who don’t understand the principles of real conservatism and have no desire to win….wait what, this is an April Fool’s Day post and none of this ever happened. We actually have a minority of the party that really are that dumb? Well shit. We’re doomed aren’t we?”

“[America’s] previous attempts at isolationism were successful. Unfortunately, they were successful for Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan. Evil is an outreach program. A solitary bad person sitting alone, harboring genocidal thoughts, and wishing he ruled the world is not a problem unless he lives next to us in the trailer park. In the big geopolitical trailer park that is the world today, he does. America has to act.”—P.J. O’Rourke, Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about getting out of world affairs in the wake of the current Eastern Europe ruckus. As is always so popular in America, Isolationism seems to be making a comeback in the psyche of the nation, it’s not just Ron Paul, he is just the mouthpiece for a larger movement. Isolationism. Because, it’s not our problem. Great idea. Let’s take a look at how well isolationism has always worked in this country’s favor over the last century…
Coming off our crazy Manifest Destiny kick, Americans swung into a full isolationist mode in the early 20th century. So much so that when people started dying by the thousands in WWI we chose to do nothing. Thousand of soldiers—British, French, Italian, German, Austrian, to name a few—suffered in trenches with some of the most horrific conditions modern warfare has to offer. But it’s not America’s problem so we do nothing. The Ottoman Empire (ally of Germany and Austria) begins genocidally slaughtering Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks so brutally the Allies actually issue a statement using the words “crime against humanity” for the first time (so I doubt everyone in America was ignorant of this). America still does nothing, because still not our problem. Then one of our ships gets torpedoed while going through a war zone, so now it’s our problem. We come in with enough troops to end the war (if we had come in years earlier it would probably have ended the war then and spared thousands upon thousands suffering and death, but, oh, that’s right it wasn’t our problem at the time).

“some men just want to watch the world burn.”

So World War I ends. President Wilson has a good idea in the form of a world organization to oppose tyranny and support democracy around the world, the League of Nations, but the isolationist quickly take power again in America and decide not to be a member of the organization. I’m not saying American participation in the League would have stopped World War II from happening, but explain to me how it would have hurt. So in the end the League of Nations is filled by almost nothing but countries that have pacifist views that will cower when anyone with a gun shows up.
The first major failure of this war weary League and America (both parties are equally guilty) is allowing the continuation of the Red Army in the former Russian Empire. World War I ended officially in 1919, but the Russian Civil War didn’t end until 1923, yet no one even really offered to help the White Army put down the communists (good call, because the Soviets didn’t cause any problems over the next 70 years or so). No, rather than actually take out the root of the problem at maybe the cost of a few thousand more lives for Western nations, here in America we chose the policy of going into a hysterical fit over the fear of communists in our country, mobilizing every federal and state power to track down what turned out to be nothing more than a few dozen radicals with access to gun powder and a rough skill in making bad mail bombs.( I’m not saying there weren’t Soviet agents ever in America, there were, but odds are they didn’t become entrenched until after the Russian Civil War was over.) So we’ll use police powers against our own people over the fear of a foreign nation but won’t actually deal with that foreign nation we fear, because it’s not our problem.

Isolationism…because evil isn’t coming after you…yet…

The next few years brought up other things that weren’t our problem. The Spanish Civil War, which allowed the country to fall to fascism. Italian aggression and empire building in Africa, but not our problem. The growing Maoist Army in China, not our problem. Invasion of China and Korea by Japan, not our problem. And dare we forget all those things Germany under Hitler did that weren’t our problem. Crimes against humanity each and every one of them. Not even counting the Holocaust, literally millions of people are being killed, raped, enslaved, and tortured. Americans can’t be that stupid to not know anything about this. Yes, many chose not to learn anything, just as nowadays many don’t bother to read about what goes on in the Sudan, because we know deep down if we knew we would be morally required to act, but American ignorance was one of choice, not one of lack of information (also much like how after we went into Germany all we found was a country filled with “Good Germans” who never knew what was going on in the concentration camps). And if all American’s were really that ignorant of these things, then how does one explain the very few Americans who went to all these wars to fight against fascism, to fight for what they believed to be right. They had to learn about it somewhere.
But these things weren’t our problem.
Then once again a weird thing happened. Low and behold after nearly every other nation who opposed fascism had fallen or was under siege, all of a sudden the fascists turned their eyes to us and it became our problem. Who could have guessed that an ideology founded on conquering the world would ever come to American shores. Completely unpredictable. So once again it suddenly became our problem again, and we went in and took down most of the bad guys. Then we went back to isolationist tendencies. Now some history buffs out there will call me crazy, because Truman’s post war policies could hardly be called isolationist—after all, we helped rebuild Western Europe and contained the Soviet Union. True, we contained the Soviet Union. This was isolationist in itself. Let’s go back to the day immediately following Japan’s surrender and look at the situation. You have Soviet Russia preparing to take total control of Eastern Europe as a “buffer zone” between them and Germany. Even at this point in history everyone knows Stalin is a worse butcher than Hitler. The bulk of the Soviet Army (devastated far more than the rest of the Allies by the war) is racing across Asia hoping to get a foothold into Japan and thus more land to control, thus leaving everything up to Moscow with minimal defenses. Gen. Patton (certainly not the most stable of men, but a strategic and tactical genius nonetheless) has this wacky plan to push the Russian army in Europe back to the Russian border if not destroy it completely. It was August, giving us at least a couple of months before those infamous Russian winters set in. Oh, and America was the only country that was a nuclear power at this point. It wouldn’t have been bloodless, but had the Allies decided to attack Soviet Russia it wouldn’t have been a long war, nor would it’s outcome been in the favor of communism. But we chose once again to not deal with a problem until it affected us.
We create the U.N., but then give two of the most evil governments in the world veto power to stop any action intended to stop their tyrannical ways.
Some more things that weren’t our problems after that. Eastern Europe is placed under a dictatorship as brutal and bloodthirsty as the one we just liberated them from. China, with Soviet help falls to communism. Tibet, after asking for U.S. help, receives no help and falls to Maoist butchers. The Soviet Union becomes a nuclear power (yes we did recognize that as our problem, but the fact is if we had recognized them as a problem a few years earlier, they wouldn’t have been around to become a nuclear threat). And after some half-hearted (I’m insulting the politician who made war policy, not the soldiers who fought) fighting we allow the communist to take North Korea (it’s not like allowing that one would ever lead to problems). Cuba also falls to communism, but not directly our problem, until low and behold communist from one part of the world start giving communist in another part of the world nuclear missiles.
So isolationism is not looking like a good option at this point to anyone who can count hundreds of millions tortured and killed as a direct result of it, but the U.S. still can’t give up it’s isolationist way. So we now try a kind of halfway isolationism. The use of the CIA to work behind the scenes and the use of the U.S. military only in “police actions.” The problem with police actions is if you have rules about when and where your troops can fire back at the enemy, and what lines they can cross, and just generally the falling short of fighting a real war then all you end up with is a lot of U.S. soldiers in body bags and a wall in D.C. commemorating the fact that despite being excellent soldiers, who never actually lost a real battle, politicians will make their deaths completely worth nothing by just leaving countries like Vietnam to communist governments.
Then Khmer Rouge takes over Cambodia and does things that might turn a Nazi’s stomach, but again, not our problem.
All this time it would take a whole book to recount all the bloody things being done in Africa that weren’t our problem.
Iran falls to a dictator whom we don’t support, falls to a dictator whom we do support, then falls to a radical Islamic cleric who no one in the world of the sane is not disturbed by. Our president at the time of this final change of power decides it’s best to be weak, and let them hold American hostages until he leaves office. But then again this is the same man whose grand stand against the invasion and resulting crimes against humanity in Afghanistan by the Soviets was best combated by boycotting the Olympics. Way to take a stand, Jimmy.
So we learned not to use police actions. So still not wanting to actually fight real wars, because it’s not really our problem, we just start arming people in their wars against our enemies. People like the rebel soldiers in Afghanistan to fight the communists (this guy named Bin Laden comes to mind), and people like Saddam Hussein to fight off Iran. I wonder if that policy ever came back to haunt us?
Oh wait, it did. Hussein invades other countries; we kick him out of Kuwait but leave him around for the next generation to deal with (incompetently I might add).
Our genius plan of dealing with the collapsing Soviet Union is to support whatever dictator comes along in the Balkans, which once again leads to genocide and U.S. troops having to go in under the cover of the U.N. (really wasn’t even our idea, it required Tony Blair twisting Clinton’s arm to get U.S. troops to go). And I’m still trying to figure out what drugs were being passed around when it came to our policies involving Russia itself, but the result was what it always is, let’s not get involved.
Then let’s try and help out in Africa, until a few bullets get fired (in a war zone of all places, who could have predicted that) and it’s decided that’s it’s better for a few soldiers to have died in vain, than to actually clear Somalia of the warlords.
Afghanistan falls to psychotic religious fanatics, not our problem. At least until the New York skyline gets a permanent makeover.
Is it just me, or does it seem that all of these things that aren’t our problem have a bad tendency of becoming our problem, and rather big problems at that? Ironic because they weren’t necessarily always big problems, in fact they would have been more easily dealt with problems back when it wasn’t our problem.
And let’s look at another pattern that seems apparent to me, when what wasn’t our problem becomes our problem we go in long enough to stop the current problem without sticking around long enough to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The few places we gone into with a plan and have stuck around in (Germany, Japan) seem to be pretty stable.
So no matter how you want to look at it isolationism on any country’s part, but especially one as large as the U.S. seems to lead to three things: (1) Torture (2) Death (3) and problems that become so big they do become our problems.

I’m not entirely sure what should be done about Venezuela, Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, or Sudan right now, mostly because we need to wrap things up in Iraq and Afghanistan before further overextending ourselves…but not doing anything is a really dumb idea as history has shown and it shows that Paul’s claim that non-interventionism is “Pro-American” is a vile lie that can only be told by the very stupid or the very evil (or both if you’re Ron Paul).

This is a rather long lecture by Milton Friedman on the issues of government in medical care. As it is so long I’m not going to write a lot, but you should watch it because, despite being over 3 decades old, every word is still very relevant.

Obamacare requires that every person in America buys insurance. This was done because without doing it every insurance provider in the nation would begin losing almost immediately and rather than lose money they would just go Atlas Shrugged on us and close shop…but by having everyone on insurance they at least still make a small profit, but only because you’ve forced millions of people who don’t need insurance onto insurance (but even then only by making everyone pay increased premiums).

The problem with this is that the Constitution gives the government no power to force people to buy something (in fact forcing people to do something against their will is expressly prohibited in the 5th Amendment’s protection of private property, and 13th Amendment). They enforce this mandate by penalizing you if you don’t buy insurance. Again, no Constitutional authority to do this.

Now the Supreme Court and Obamacare got around this by saying this penalty isn’t a fine, it’s a tax (the strangest tax in history, but still a tax). The problem with this is Constitutionally taxes have to originate in House of Representatives and Obamacare originated in the Senate.

So either it’s forcing you to buy something, and is unconstitutional, or it’s a tax in which case the bill was not passed in a constitutional manner.

This is silly. Traditionally rights have been considered things that you are born with or you would have even if there was no civilization around. If you’re alone on an island you still have the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. In society no one has the right to take these away from you, which is why these are called negative rights—you have them and no one can negate them. Even if someone has the power to do so no one has the ethical, moral, or political basis to take away by force your negative rights. Ethical government is based on the idea that, being a part of society, you give up a very small amount (not so small these days) of your rights to protect the vast majority of them. At least in the ideal.

Now, personally I don’t think there has ever been a good argument for positive rights, but the bigger problem is that positive rights always infringe upon negative rights. If you have the right to a living wage, then others must provide, and thus must have their property taken away, to provide your living wage. Thus you have no right to property if you have the right to a living wage. If you have a right to health care, then doctors and nurses must treat you or any medical issue (not only life threatening ones, hospitals and doctors were required to treat life threatening issues by law even before Obamacare) whether you can pay or not. This means a doctor cannot choose to not take you as a patient. Thus the right to healthcare means doctors do not have freedom of choice and thus do not have the right to liberty…I believe that’s called slavery. Now you think this may be an extreme example, but whenever positive rights have become laws you see fewer protection of negative rights without exception throughout history.

Also when something is free or perceived as free, as in the case of Obamacare, you always get people wanting more of it.

This will cause more people to go to the doctor (remember there will be fewer of them) for more minor issues. This will cause longer lines and less efficient care, thus treatment quality will go down, and mortality rates will go up. This can be seen in any country with socialized medicine where you see such things as gout go months without treatment (whereas it is almost always immediately caught here) or where due to the wait, limb amputation as a result a diabetes is vastly more common under systems like Obamacare than it has been in the preObamacare American system. (These are just two examples. Every disease gets worse under socialized medicine).

Welcome to Obamacare…can you find your way to a doctor…or will you just fall into the pit of Despair?

You will also have the problem of price control boards. Now, we have always had these in one form or another (but they got really annoying after the government created the dreaded HMO…that’s right the biggest thing people hated in healthcare before Obamacare was also a government created debacle). You buy a certain level of insurance and the insurance company says that due to the level you have bought we will pay X amount of dollars, but no more. This becomes an issue with experimental treatment and long-term problems like cancer. The insurance will pay for your pain meds, as they are required to by your policy, but they will not pay for expensive chemo and radiation (not because they’re heartless but because they would go broke if they paid for everyone who didn’t pay the premiums for that level of care). If you want more coverage, you can always buy more. The problem with Obamacare is that government price control boards are going into place and will say what you can and can’t have for treatment, if you are in the government exchanges. The difference here is if an insurance company denied to pay, you could always pay out of pocket, under Obamacare the price control board’s decision is final (if try to pay out of pocket you are again subject to fines, and rationing will have made these procedures already more expensive which makes already expensive procedures astronomically unreachable, so it’s the same thing as making them illegal). This is why they have earned the moniker “death panels” because if they deny your claim, you die…if the insurance company denied you, you still had other options and it was up to you if you wanted to spend your life savings on buying those extra few months.

The unfortunate effect will be that as medical prices rise, what is covered by the price control boards will contract drastically. Thus even more things will become deadly.

There are a lot of other ways it will ruin the medical profession, but I think you get the point.

Finally the economic reasons why it’s bad.

Ignoring the fact that higher death rates may have some negative economic effects…it’s just bad in every way for the economy.

Obamacare requires businesses with a certain number of employees to buy insurance at a certain level for their employees.

As premiums rise, as I stated above, this means it becomes more and more expensive to hire an employee. If you earn $45,000 plus benefits right now, it actually costs your employer around $60,000 between salary, benefits, and social security to employee you. As premiums rise so does the cost of employing each person.

Whether businesses care about their employees or not, they first have to stay in business. They are hesitant to hire new people as new hires also cost money for training and you usually aren’t getting the full effect of the employee for a few months until they get into a rhythm with the system of your company. So you’re taking a loss with each new employee even before Obamacare. The raised premiums then mean with each new employee will have to provide more for the company to be worth their total cost. Thus you tend to fire the lower performers because you’re not getting your money’s worth. So fewer people hired, more people fired. Also since you have to provide fewer benefits for part time workers than full time, you are more likely to hire people only part time. We have seen all of this over the last few years.

Small businesses are hurt too because a small business can only grow to a certain size before it has to provide benefits. So when it reaches that point, a business can either not grow, which hurts economic growth, or suddenly provide full medical coverage…and no small business at that size can afford to make that immediate jump in the cost of each employee. Again we have slowly seen the effects this has on the economy.

This leads to overall negative ripple effects in prosperity, take home pay, innovation, research…it creates a bad economy all around.

Let me first clarify my use of the word “evil.” As a New Ager I believe that every single soul in the universe will one day reach enlightenment and be welcomed into heaven. Don’t try and list off really evil people in history because they too will, one day, make it back to God. So my belief is that people aren’t evil, they can be very ignorant of what they’re doing, but they themselves and their souls are not evil. But I do classify their actions as evil. I classify such actions as Evil when their actions not only delay their own return to enlightenment, but also hurt the progression of others, whether the act is malicious or well-intentioned…

Okay, so we’ve got that out of the way, why is modern liberalism evil? Doesn’t liberalism support equal rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness for all humanity, democratic republicanism, the rule of law over force, and all are equal before the law and all that stuff? No, you’re thinking of Classical Liberalism, a philosophy which is at the heart of the Enlightenment and American Revolution. Modern conservatism and modern liberalism are both out growths of Classical liberalism. Philosophically modern conservatism is more of Classical Liberalism’s heir (in practice it sadly falls a little short), modern liberalism is Classical Liberalism’s idiot bastard child.

Why? you ask. After all, as a friend of mine recently said:

“As a Democrat, I support social welfare programs — that’s not ‘babysitting the populace.’ I think that government has a responsibility to provide programs for those in need.”

And it should come as no shock that this butcher is a hero to modern liberals.

Isn’t that a good thing? Wanting to help those in need? It seems so good?…And yet, it is evil. And let me explain why.(And I’m not attacking my friend in particular, I’m pretty sure almost every liberal in America would agree with that statement in its entirety).

Let’s look closely at the 2nd sentence in that statement (mostly because the first sentence is self-contradictory).

The government has a responsibility to provide programs for those in need.

There are three key terms in this sentence: Responsibility, Provide, and Need. We’ll deal with each one separately

The Responsibility of Government

What is the responsibility of government? Well if you listen to Classical Liberalism and modern conservatives who have their heads screwed on correctly, government is there to do things. Protect your rights and do those things which only a force as large as government can. What are your rights? The classic list is Life, Liberty, Property/Pursuit of Happiness. What does it mean to protect these things? Does it mean the government should stop me from eating that Big Mac because that will cause a cholesterol build up which will one day lead to my death? Nope. Protection means to protect you from others forcibly destroying your life or liberty. Through this the government has a responsibility to create a military to protect you from outside sources, and a police force (FBI, State Police, Highway Patrol, Sheriffs, and Local Police) and a court system for internal threats. They are there to stop others from taking things away from you.

Notice in this understanding of government’s responsibility they are not giving you anything. You were born with life and liberty it’s just no one can rightfully take it away from you without justification.

The second issue is things that only something as large as government can tend to. Things like standards. Weights, measurement, currency, laws for conducting business, highway and streets (because they all need to be standardized, although upkeep and repair should be at least contracted out if not privatized).These things need to be standardized because without them you have about zero chance of pursing happiness successfully. For instance one of things government has a right to do is standardize what is and isn’t legal banking practices so that everyone is keeping their books in the same way and thus everyone (and by everyone I primarily mean mainly stockholder and potential stockholders) can make sure everything is proper and the system is working and not lying/cheating/taking advantage. Our government chooses to not partake in this responsibility—I say this because the banking practices on sub-prime loans of which all the banks currently are still engaging in by government directive, which were designed by Congress to effectively destroy the market (even if that wasn’t their intent), were and still are very legal. That’s right it’s legal to do something that will cause economic collapse. But does Congress rewrite the laws? No. It would rather discuss your right to health care (which does not exist).

And herein is where the evil lies in that. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are things you are born with and that no one gives to you. Health care is something that is given to you. Why is this evil? Because, it is an insult to the value of humanity. The human soul is an end unto itself, completely capable through its work and mind of providing everything it needs for itself. It’s a concept called free will. To say that something must be given to you (aside from the rights granted by your Creator), that you are not capable of getting it for yourself means two things. You are not complete and have insufficient power to live a whole life, and that whoever does provide this for you does have that power. Traditionally the relationship is called that of the master and slave…and in the scenario of the modern liberalism, government is not playing the role of slave (which it should be).To say that government has a responsibility to provide anything perverts the concept of a right, it perverts the concept of government which should be used as a shield against the irrational forces which choose not to recognize your God given rights, but rather into the driving force that makes your life complete. It subordinates your will to the will of government…to the will of the party, the leader (what’s the German word for “leader”?), or the will of Big Brother.

What the Government should provide?

Well nothing is the obvious answer if you read the previous paragraphs. But there is another reason why the government providing anything is just plain evil. To provide something means the government has to get it from somewhere. Where does it get the money to operate? Taxes. Now we don’t pay our taxes out the goodness of our heart. If we are rational we pay for what the government should be doing because we recognize government is a necessary evil that requires funds to operate to protect us…That accounts for about 10 cents of every dollar the government collects. We pay the other 90 cents because the government has guns and prisons and thieves called the IRS who will go into your bank account and just take it without your permission.(Anyone else miss the good old days of Robin Hood and the American Revolution, when we knew what to do with tax collectors?).

But it’s not just their theft and extortion that’s evil. Back to health care. Notice what’s implied by the concept of you have a right to health care. That means a doctor has to treat you, whether you will pay them or not. If it’s an absolute right it can’t be ethically paid for. You don’t pay someone for your liberty or your life? Do you? No, that would be evil. You can pay someone to protect those things, but you’re not paying them for life or liberty, you have those by being a human, you’re paying them to act as a shield against outside forces that seek to steal those things. So if health care was a Right that you have, it would be unethical or evil to demand payment for it. But if you have the right to demand the services of a doctor or a nurse, or demand the right to a drug that could save your life, what does that mean? It means that the doctor does not have the right to refuse you treatment, payment or no. And if the doctor doesn’t have the right to refuse treatment, the right to demand payment, doesn’t that mean he is a slave. Doesn’t it mean that the drug company and the scientist who came up with the drug are slaves to the person demanding the drug if they don’t have the right to determine what they think is a fair price for the drug. You may have the right to keep up your health as an extension of your liberty, but you do not have the right to demand someone else look after your health.

I feel I need to make this clear. If the doctor has a right to demand payment for his knowledge and his service then health care must logically be conditional. Rights are not conditional. If health care is a right, then health care providers must logically be slaves. It’s one or the other. Rationally there can be no having health care as a right and not having slaves. Since modern liberalism states health care is a right, logically they are calling for the enslavement of an entire class of people, namely health care providers. Modern liberalism claims lots of things are rights, a livable wage, for instance, but when you run it through logically if it is a right then someone must be forced to provide this right. That person is called a slave.

So that’s twice now that modern liberalism has devalued human life to little more than slavery. Let’s take a look at the third part of the sentence.

Who are those in need?

Those in need—are we talking about those in need of protection from genocidal tyrants? Those in need of defense against a culture that debases women as less than human? Nope. From the context of the sentence it seems we’re talking about people who don’t have enough stuff/money according to our liberal friends. But before we give those in need everything they “need” let’s look at why they’re needy.

“You need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty – finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.”

– William Galston, advisor to Bill Clinton.

So I’m not a sociologist here, but using the information provided for us by the Clinton administration, it would seem that poverty is primarily caused by making really stupid choices. Taking another look at the statistics, as economist Thomas Sowell loves to point out in just about every book he writes, over half of those people who are below the poverty line are in their 20’s and won’t be below the poverty line in 10 years, having given up their places among the poor to a new set of 20 somethings. So it would seem that most people tend to learn from their youthful mistakes. Who would have thought in a capitalistic system that rewards hard work and intelligence that the stupid and lazy get the shaft.

But the call goes, ‘what about their children! The children of these people who live below the poverty line will never be able to break this cycle.’ To which I say: Bullshit. Every school I have ever worked at full-time could be called “at risk” education. And at every school some of my brightest students were not the children of middle class families, but the children of parents who lived in poverty. They saw how their family lived and they choose to get an education so that wouldn’t be them. The children who repeat the cycle of poverty are those who CHOOSE to not strive, to not learn, to not break the cycle. It is a choice, as the opportunity is always there in a capitalistic system to get out– it has nothing to do with race or gender or religion or your parent’s background. It is a matter of choice. To deny this denies free will, oh wait there once again we find that to say that people are needy means that we don’t believe they have free will, the responsibility to take the consequences of their choices; once again liberalism has devalued human beings to little more than a mindless thing.

Modern liberalism’s problem is that it devalues the inherent value of human life. It see personal charity not as something that should be done because it benefits the giver but only as a duty that must be obeyed without. It sees all

Everyone of these people believed in government not liberty…they what we call in the modern day, liberals.

of humanity as either problems to fix or tools to use. But a human being is not a problem or a tool. It is an end unto itself. Only from this perspective can a life have value. Liberalism pushes everyone away from this value through its destruction of free will through its imposition of slavery and through its denial of human value. I’ll be the first to say that history is more than filled with far worse examples of this evil than your modern American liberal, but it is a difference in degree not kind. I will also admit that while this idea pushes people away from any kind of personal growth, it is the person’s choices to follow that philosophy, not the philosophy itself that is at fault for not achieving personal enlightenment. But it is still used as a tool for preventing the progression of many human lives…and in that sense it is absolute evil.

Some might argue that we should punish those who have done so. That we need to go in to save lives.

But they’re looking at it wrong. While we do as decent people have a responsibility to stop genocide, that isn’t enough, we have to make sure we can actually improve the situation. The question shouldn’t necessarily be is Assad (or the rebels) killing people, it should be, can we stop the killing? In Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan there were either prodemocracy forces (and in those last two I will fully admit we botched any attempt to rally those forces and form a real government)…and in Japan we had the wherewith-all to stay in charge for over a decade to ensure a stable government was left in place. The problem with Syria is that it’s a choice between Assad and his Iran/Hamas terrorists backers and the Rebels (read Al-Qaeda)…if either side wins, they’ll use the chemical weapons and kill the people of Syria and probably other nations…and America at this point (even if we had a leader and not an idiot in charge) doesn’t have the resolve to stay the time needed and spend the money required to take over Syria and build a system that will end the killing of people. The fact is that no matter what we do, people are going to die. If we help people die, if we don’t help people die. There is no way out of this that can stop the killing.

Kerry was against intervention over chemical weapons before he was for it…and he was for it before he was against it…

Now some people, whose opinions I respect, suggest we should go in and just bomb Assad’s ability for air dominance, level the playing field and let the rebels and Assad fight it out on equal terms. I can see the wisdom in this…but this assumes a leader who knows what do to and how to handle such a campaign. And here’s the problem if you had such a leader my NeoCon side might just say, why half-ass it?, go in occupy the nation and set up a democracy…but lacking such a leader I don’t know if I can even trust the idiot we have now to level the playing field…honestly has he done anything else right in foreign policy? Which again leads me back to it’s best to stay out of this mess.

The silver lining to not doing anything at the moment is that this is Hamas and Al-Qaeda killing each other…which saves us the time and trouble of doing it.

But let’s talk about what we should do if reality had no bearing on this (or, say, if we had done the intelligent thing and elected a leader and good man and not a buffoon and corrupt hack). Now Syria would present it’s own challenges but I think the best way we should do with Syria, if we were going to get involved is to look at our two most recent mistakes, Iraq and Afghanistan, and see where we screwed up there.

Now let’s first deal with some of the points of why we went. We went to take out terrorist threats (and both nations did present such a threat), we went to do the ethical thing and stop genocide, and we went to spread democracy. All could have been accomplished if Bush and/or Obama had had even half a brain between them…but Obama likes to grovel and apologize for America’s virtue and Bush was an isolationist (just look at his debate with Gore where he said he didn’t want to engage in nation building…so stop blaming NeoConservatives for Bush’s idiocy, he was never one of us and never will be). It was the right war to fight.

It was also fought well. The military is not the part to blame, it is the diplomats and politicians who screwed the occupation up, not the war itself.

Now let’s review what we should have done but didn’t. And, in terms of full disclosure, I honestly thought we would have been bright enough to do these things when I gave my support for these wars…I thought that even if Bush was dumb enough to not know to do these, his advisors would at least be bright enough…boy was I wrong.

Do you trust this man to do anything right? Do you even trust to not make it worse?

The first thing we should not have done was turn over Iraq and Afghanistan to Iraqi and Afghani control so soon. We were in control of Germany for year (and only gave them independence to gain their alliance in the Cold War) and were in complete control of Japan for nearly a decade. We should have remained in political and military control of Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a decade as well. It takes time to rebuild the infrastructure of a nation, it takes time to get the culture used to the principles of rule of law and a democratic-Republic, it takes time to properly write a Constitution. All of these were rushed for political convenience. And that is partly what ultimately made these situations so terrible.

The nations should have been broken up. Their current borders are arbitrary creations of colonialism and forced numerous ethnic and religious groups that loathe each other. Pluralism is also superior, but it grows best naturally when two group both doing well see each other as equals that both can grow and learn from, not from being forced together. Iraq, should have been three nations (Kurds, Sunni, Shia)…Afghanistan should have likely been broken into a Southern and Northern part (although I’ll admit my knowledge of the breakdown of clans, ethnicities and religious divisions in Afghanistan is not as deep as it could be). My point here being that smaller less diverse areas are easier to administrate, easier to work with, easier to maintain stability it…and if there is terrorist activity in one it does not mean that destabilizes the whole operation (for instance Kurdistan would have likely been stable, and possibly even economically prosperous very quickly which would have led to more stability in the whole area and an ally we can count on).

We should have never let the armies disband as quickly as we did. We should have kept them as POWs vetting every single one of them before releasing them. This would have delayed the terrorists attacks.

I agree completely with the surges, only disagreeing that they should have been done earlier and probably to an even greater degree.

We should have burned each and every poppy field in all of Afghanistan to the ground and shot any drug lord who complained. The terrorists live off the funds of the drug trade and one of our first goals should have been to deny them any and all funds.

The Peace Corp should have been recalled for training in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Dari, (and anything else we needed) and then sent to Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no point in having a Peace Corp in helping in social and economic development if you’re not going to use it where it was needed most.

Border walls. As we have learned in the US, there is nothing so important as a border wall…more so when dealing with terrorists. We should have been building walls on the border of every single nation, starting with the borders of Iran, Pakistan, Syria. If we had done this the terrorist activity would have been drastically reduced (as most of it came from Iran, Pakistan and Syria)…and if there had been a division of the nations we should have had walls between them as well to help stop the spread of terrorism.

With staying longer, our first responsibility should have been building up roads, water, electricity, schools, hospitals and the basic of industry…the infrastructure needed to support a republic of law. Training the military and police should have been a distant second (because when you rush that, you let the terrorist infiltrate easily and attack us from within, as we’ve seen all too well) as the military can handle that for a longer period as we’ll be there for a while.

There is no way we should have ever left Iraq without gaining a permanent military base and the same goes for Afghanistan. One of the only reasons why these invasions made sense in the long run from a tactical stand point was gaining foot holds to ensure stability in the area (would Syria be as violent as it is right now if there was a permanent US base with missile launch capability just a few minutes from it’s borders?)

This is a picture of the handy work of Obama’s allies in Syria…the massacre of Christians for no other reason than their religion. Yes we should help these people.

Among stronger women’s right pushes than we made, we should have made it a requirement that both nations add full rights to women and some version of our burning bed justifications (which more or less makes it justifiable for a woman who is afraid of her husband beating or murdering her to kill her husband…and then we should have probably armed every woman as we could have). This would hopefully have cleared out a lot of the worst bastards we would have to worry about, and the scum who objected should have just been summarily shot as well because you know they’re shit who would be nothing but a blight on humanity. (And I can hear some liberal whiny about it’s their culture who are you to judge. I’m a human being with a brain, that’s who. Any man, any law, any religion that says women are inferior to men is shit and deserves to be wiped off the Earth with extreme prejudice.) We should probably also have installed a lot of women in positions of power, those who objected can be shot. (This is more to quickly identify the terrorist scum and quickly eliminate them).

We should never have stopped it being a major function of the military and CIA to gather intelligence. We should be capturing terrorists leaders and water-boarding every last piece of information out of them. The problem with drones isn’t their use or their death toll…it’s that they’re being used in lieu of gathering intelligence which actually (causes more death in the long run) kills even more people in the long run.

(On a side note) We should have backed, supported and armed the revolution that started in Iran. Conversely we should not have given moral support to the largely terrorist led Arab Spring.

We should have gone in and still should be going in with the mentality that first and foremost this is a war. If you are dealing with rational people then negotiate with them, but otherwise there is no retreat, no fallback, no quarter and all that is acceptable is either complete and unconditional surrender or every member of your opposition dead. No negotiations with the Taliban, no playing nice for Iran and Pakistan. This is a war, we are in the right (or at least we could have been) and we will not stop until every tyrant is dead or in jail and every innocent citizen enjoys full human rights.

Now, while Syria presents it’s own challenges and idiosyncrasies, but it is these general principals that should guide the occupation and rebuilding of any nation. And the question you need to ask is, do you think Obama has the spine and intelligence to do any of this? Do you think he even has the brains to carry out attacks on Assad’s military targets?

For me the answer is simple. No. I would love to spread liberty and end genocide everywhere…but from what I have seen of this nation, and especially Obama, we don’t know how to do it, we don’t have the patience it takes to do it, and right now we certainly aren’t in an economic position to do it. In an ideal world intervention is what we should do, but the realities of the present state that our current situation will only lead to making things worse.

So Republicans in typical fashion are trying to shoot themselves in the foot with their “Defund Obamacare push” (hint the liberals want the GOP to win on this one so they don’t have to have Obamacare hanging around their necks in 2014 and 2016, so they can keep the White House and take back Congress just long enough to make sure no one can ever take Obamacare out…if you want to get rid of Obamacare, really, really get rid of it, you need to make people see, and unfortunately feel, the misery they voted for. The point here is to get rid of the idea that government is the answer, not just a temporary reprieve on one horrific law. The Defund Obamacare group is looking to win the battle, possibly at the cost of losing the war). But while this is going on, Democrats are spending billions just to advertise Obamacare (if a law is so bad you have to advertise it, that should tell you something). And to top it all off, a couple days ago Obama made his one of his typically brain less statements. “Because in the United States of America, health insurance isn’t a privilege – it is your right.”

Why do I bring all of these different groups up in the same paragraph? Because they’re all idiots. They are all predicated on the idea that the government has to do something (less idiotic for the Republicans, but they seem to have given up the idea of full repeal, the only real answer, because they seem to acknowledge the lie that government needs to provide something). At best this belief is idiotic. At worst it’s just plain evil. (On another side note evil people are very rare, but evil ideas are all too common, and morons have a long history of latching onto evil ideas with the best of intentions. So please understand I’m not calling the people supporting Obamacare evil–unless their name is Harry/Nancy/Barrack/Michelle–merely their idea is). Why is it stupid/evil? Well, let me be as clear as I can possibly be:

YOU DO NOT HAVE A !@#$%^& RIGHT TO HEALTHCARE!!!!

Like the right to property, and the right to pursue happiness, you have the right to earn a living and to use that money as you see fit, perhaps by buying healthcare or healthcare insurance, but you have no natural right to healthcare.

Sorry, Barry, but just because you want something, it’s not a right.

I know I am about to repeat things that I have said before, but I feel I need to. I feel everyone needs to until this country learns that rights are not entitlements, rights are not things given to you but opportunities to be taken care of, and to exercise your rights does not require the acts, intentions, or contribution of anyone else.

A natural right as conceived of in the theory of natural rights and in the Declaration of Independence is something you would have without the presence of government or even society. It’s what does Robinson Crusoe have when he’s on the island before he decides to violate Friday’s natural right to freedom. Well, if you find yourself trapped in a bad episode of “Lost” you have the right to life, liberty, property, and to pursue happiness. A lot of what the original Bill of Rights includes is also there (speech, religion, assembly, arms, and self-incrimination) but notice that if you’re on an island by yourself you don’t have medical care. You have the right to take care of yourself, but islands in the middle of nowhere are not staffed with hospitals and doctors just waiting for you to get sick. So it’s certainly not a natural right.

But we don’t live on an island in the middle of nowhere. The upside to this is that we don’t have to engage in a philosophical war with a black cloud; the downside to this is that we do have to deal with other people. And while most people are rational and good intentioned, there are the random people who don’t respect your rights and try to take what isn’t theirs. Because of these random few who ruin everything, and because, we want complex things that we can’t do without laws and someone being in charge (like roads) we turn to the necessary evil of government. Now good government is a skill and it took us a while to realize that limits need to be put on it because just following the guy who can kill you or the guy with the best bullshit may not have been the best choice in the beginning, even though it’s what historically happened. So we had to come up with a whole new set of rights (quartering, due process, equality under the law). But notice all these other rights limit what the government does. Nowhere have you been given anything. You were either born with your rights, some of which you gave away to ensure protection against stupid people violating your rights, and other “rights” were restrictions placed on the government on top of which your natural rights were completely off-limits. But still no right has been given to you that you already didn’t have. And again, you didn’t have the right to health care if you were stuck in the state of nature.

The right to healthcare is a ridiculous, idiotic and borderline evil idea called a “positive right.” A negative right means something that no one has the right to take away from you–like your life, your liberty, or your property. Those are things you’re entitled to, thus no one has any right to reduce your rights to them. A positive right on the other hand means something that you have a right to expect to be given to you. If you’re reading that last sentence a few times because it seems to make no sense, good, that means you’re sane. Healthcare is a positive right. It is the idea that just because I showed up you have to give me healthcare. Just because you’re alive other people have to give something to you? Well I know that really egocentric people act like this, but to actually portray this as a theory of government is insane. And while virtues of love and charity say that ethically we should give people more than they may deserve, it doesn’t work in the opposite way where you have the right to demand people give you more than you serve—that’s not ethics it’s also insanity.

But more than insane it’s wrong. You can’t give a piece of property or a service without taking it from someone else–i.e. theft or slavery. Now while I believe the capitalist system isn’t a zero-sum game that always creates more and more, theoretically having no limit to how much wealth it can create, the kind of property transfer that the government deals in is a zero-sum for whatever moment it exists in. The government stealing things and giving it to others, transferring wealth from one person to another, not only harms the ability to create more wealth, but given government inefficiency, it actually creates less wealth (especially given the government’s addiction to spending money it doesn’t have). The government can’t just give people drugs without stealing it from drugs companies…if it pays for those drugs then it can only do that by stealing hard earned wealth from the taxpayers. Either way it’s theft. A person can’t be guaranteed healthcare without doctors being forced to treat them. After all either the doctors are paid (and if the government’s involved it’s paid with stolen taxpayer money) or simply forced to work as a slave. And you’ll find most doctors will not want to work in that system which will cause the greatest healthcare system in the world, the US, to become one of the worst when all the doctors leave or simply retire.

But some idiots (Alan Colmes to name one) say that the government has a right to help the people under the actual Constitution. They quote Article I Section 8:

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and
Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general
Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be
uniform throughout the United States;”

And then they point to the part that says “General welfare” , isn’t providing healthcare promoting the general welfare? Well one that would first depend on the government being able to do anything well, which it can’t, but more importantly it is a gross misunderstanding of the meaning of “general welfare.” Even if you took the most liberal meaning of the phrase at the time the Constitution was written the term general welfare does not mean helping people like our current meaning of welfare–it means providing improvements to the whole of the country that affects everyone (roads, bridges, communication systems, in other words – infrastructure). The key is the word general. It needs to be something that can be used by everyone. I can’t take your doctor prescribed drugs after you’ve taken them, so there is nothing general about a system that helps individuals. (And don’t even give me that bullshit about their being able to provide for society if they were healthy…if they were providing for society they would have a job with which they could afford healthcare).

The government isn’t there to protect you from yourself or from nature. It’s there to protect you from other idiots. Your bad living habits and your genetic disposition toward a disease, while unfortunate, is not the government’s responsibility. But given that the government has stolen and inefficiently used the money that people who might have been able to charitably donate to your healthcare, the government is not only destroying their rights it’s destroying their ability to help you.

The government destroys all it touches–it can’t help it, it’s its nature. Especially when it tries to give you things you don’t have a right to. And you don’t have a right to healthcare!

So a friend shared with me this gruesomely titled article, “Top Democrat Pushing For “One Child” Population Control In America.” Now, the Democrat in question is Michael E. Arth, a failed Democratic candidate for the governor’s mansion in Florida. So I’m not sure if I would say “Top Democrat” is completely accurate…but he’s certainly up there…but his statements are actually rather typical for liberals and their insane fear of overpopulation.

Here are some fun highlights:

Now, thanks to the one-child policy – to which there are many exceptions, by the way – China’s ageing population will probably not grow much more from now on, as long as they don’t remove the restrictions.

China, and the rest of the world, would be better served by a choice-based marketable birth license plan, or “birth credits,” that could stop or reverse population growth on a dime. Birth credits allow people to have as many children as they desire and can manage and reward people who are willing to give up that right.

The limit to individual freedom is where the exercise of an individual right begins to infringe on the rights we hold in common.

If you feel like vomiting, I can’t blame you.

Liberals seem to think that the world is heading to an apocalyptic scenario where every part of the world is crammed with people stacked on top of each other while simultaneously the Malthusian nightmare of perpetual famine, war, pollution and death. And of course the only way to solve this problem is the same answer liberals have for every single problem in the history of human existence*: more government regulation. To a liberal we of course need the government to limit how many children we can have, license who can have children, punish those whom we don’t like having children, and provide free ways to dispose of those nasty little bastards when you don’t want to have them.** I think we’ve all joked, upon seeing the inept wretches out there that have children, that there should be licensing to have children…but we also all agree that the idiots who run the DMV with such efficiency, the NSA with such high moral standards, and Treasury with such common sense and restraint, are quite literally the most unqualified people to issue such license, and are in fact the people whose births we hoped would have been prevented by such regulation. I think we can all agree Joe Biden’s mother made a terrible, terrible mistake in deciding to keep him. Now you may think I’m exaggerating, that it’s only a few kooks…but no. A search of the terms Overpopulation, Sustainability, Carrying Capacity yield articles from CNN, MSNBC, Salon, and of course this one from the UN itself on the horrific terror that overpopulation brings. And there is a plethora of even less reputable sources. Granted I may not always view these as the most accurate of sources, but it does show a mentality that thinks that overpopulation is a problem…and for them it is a problem related to all their whiny fake environmentalist hysteria, and just general hatred of the individual who makes their own choices.

You can see this hatred is for the individual in Arth’s words:

The limit to individual freedom is where the exercise of an individual right begins to infringe on the rights we hold in common.

There is no such thing as “rights held in common.” Only individuals have rights. ONLY INDIVIDUALS. Groups do not hold rights. We can talk about balancing the needs of the whole versus the rights of one person, we can talk about practicality, but never make the mistake that the call for pragmatism in policy has anything to do with the rights of groups. Only individuals hold rights, because only individuals can make the choices to exercise those rights. When people talk about group rights held in common, they are only saying that a government task master will be the one exercising control and choice over the sheep they control. And what greater control could there be than to say who can and cannot have a child and when they can or can’t. This coming from the party that says government has no right to say what you do in the bedroom or with whom.

See all the blue…that is areas that is going to experience a very large population drop within a generation…the green will be lucky to stay at current levels.

Part of the problem is they hold Malthus’s ideas as gospel. For those not familiar with them, here is the short, short version. Malthus believes that technology increased food production arithmetically (10, 12, 14, 16, 18…all plus 2) while population grew geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32…all times 2) over a certain period of time. So when you start and there is food for 10,000 people and you only have 2,000, you’re all good…but after a while you have food for 16,000 and a population of 16,000…still good until the next generation when you don’t have enough food to feed 14,000. This leads to wars over food, famine from lack, disease from malnutrition (modern liberals would add pollution from over farming habits) and just suffering in general. The problem here is that Malthus understood nothing about the coming effects of science, technology, innovation, mass production, the industrial revolution, and of course capitalism. ***

Overpopulation is a lie. It is not a global problem. Like so many things it is merely a tool of fear, an excuse to expand the power of those in control over the rest of us.

However, I would like to say that this does not mean that the opposite is completely true as some foolish conservatives seems to claim. Overpopulation isn’t a global problem…but it is a problem in certain areas. The third world has a major problem with over population. Yes capitalism and all the benefits it brings make Malthus’ predictions pointless…but without capitalism everything Malthus feared goes on in the third world with deadly accuracy. And overpopulation makes it worse because it actually works against creating capitalism. The most egregious example is of course parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. There you see overpopulation continue in a way that actually prevents capitalism from taking root. It keeps the population just malnourished enough to prevent them from really having the energy to find the entrepreneurial spirit. It keeps any attempt to build the infrastructure necessary for the modern economy just out of reach because once you plan, invest, and create infrastructure for one level of population the population has grown just enough to make that level of infrastructure inadequate. It prevents the growth of a middle class and hampers mass education since so much time must be spent looking for what resources there are that must be spread out among the whole. Malthus wasn’t wrong about what happens, he just didn’t know you had to add the caveat “unless you have capitalism.”

All I can say is that I think we should all feel very lucky that the government isn’t in control of every aspect of our medical care…oh wait…well crap…

But despite the fact that overpopulation may be a problem in certain areas due more to lack of economic infrastructure than actual population, overpopulation, is not, has never been and will never be a global problem.

*Unless it involves narcotics or regulation the health standards of abortion clinics. The liberals are quite dead set against government even acknowledging such things exist beyond your absolute right to use such things.

**I’m prochoice, but the way the left defend the absolute right of any woman to abort a fetus the day before her due date is just a tad disturbing. Like most rational prochoice people I find little problem with abortion in the first trimester, but anything after that starts getting ethically iffy…although, conversely, if you’re so unspeakably stupid that you haven’t made up your mind by 20 weeks, you may not be qualified to have children.

***I’ll attack the idea, but honestly, I have a hard time really blaming Malthus who wrote around 1800. He wasn’t that far off for his time. Yes there had been many technological advances over the 2,000 years before him…like crop rotation, and how to make really bad steel, and gun powder. But in the grand scheme of things the 2,000 years before Malthus saw almost no advances when compared to the 200 years that followed him. Yeah we can look to the Renaissance and see where the groundwork was laid for modern science and technology, but almost none of it had materialized into anything practical when Malthus wrote. They were still using chamber pots. Bleeding was still a popular medical technique, and in terms of practicality quantum mechanics has more meaning to your life than electricity had for Malthus. So I really can’t blame him for not seeing how much technology driven by capitalism (also a new idea in Malthus’s time) could radically change the way people lived. He had no way to foresee the massive upheaval of technology that would follow him

The fall of this city reads like the story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Large government spends, overregulates, gives into unions at every turn, hampers business at every opportunity, a deference to cronyism without any concern for free markets, corruption, all leading to the destruction of a city that still has all the infrastructure necessary for growth. And the worst part is that this can be easily, EASILY reversed. Lower taxes, remove regulations, gut the bureaucracy, open up school choice, tell the unions exactly where they stick all their whiny demands. It would be a slow growth at first, and the city would need to redirect every single cent they get to police to clean up the dangerous streets of Detroit first (although allowing open carry and remove the restrictions that allows law abiding citizens to procure weapons to protect themselves could solve that problem, criminals tend to go where the targets are easy and a well armed populace is not that) and fix the crumbling infrastructure second. If the city did these things and let the free market and individual choice drive the way the city would be thriving again within a decade.

But we know they won’t do that. And so the city will continue to decay.

But I’m sure if you asked idiots like Paul Krugman or Barry the answer would clearly be that we just didn’t spend enough money and we didn’t regulate enough. Because that’s always the problem for liberals. Government is never the problem and always the solution, even though they don’t have a single shred of evidence to back that claim up.

I’ve heard all of these. All of these statements are incorrect. Why are they are incorrect? Because they like to play fast and loose with the meaning of words. They like to ignore that often in political philosophy there are ideal systems and there are pragmatic realities. That there are actual actions and there is PR. There is where the society is headed and where it is now. And liberals will always use the definition you’re not actually using in context.

For instance if you say that France is socialist, they’ll point out that some industries haven’t been nationalized thus it is not a socialist nation it’s a mixed economy. You’re looking at the fact that France is headed in that direction and the pragmatic reality, they’re looking at is where it is now. If you complain that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a Communist, they’ll point out that she hasn’t endorsed this or that policy from Soviet Russia. You’re looking at where they’re heading and what their ideals are, they only look at the words spoken so far and not making logical connections as to motives. You point out there is no difference between complete Socialism and complete Communism in reality; they’ll start talking about ideals and the utopia to come.

So let’s clear some things up.

There is the Communist Utopia, that place where government dissolves and everybody lives together in a global commune and sings “Kumbaya” and does their best and the shmoo run wild providing all our needs. This place never existed and never will exist on a national or international level. It can work with small groups of people who willingly join, but like pure democracy, it tends to fall apart when the group gets bigger than a couple dozen. This is what liberals claim they mean by socialism, but they forget that this pipe dream requires full and complete ideal Socialism first, even in their own arguments. They just think that the tyrannical government can somehow also be perfectly benevolent and will magically give up power when it has accomplished its goals (in a way no tyrant ever gave up power). And of course this is all silly anyway because history has shown without exception that the system ideal Communism really likes is anarchy, which only ever leads to post-apocalyptic wastelands.

Then there is practical Communism. Soviet Russia, Maoist China, North Korea, Cuba. This has near complete control over all aspects of the economy. They have numerous laws in both social and economic sectors. They are enforced with viciousness by police who basically answer to no one. The governments are controlled by a small cabal of people who have control of everything and while there may be the pretense of elections, the outcome is always the same. Slave labor and murder of citizens is how the populace is kept in its place. And all the time this is called socialism (because this is ideal socialism, although like in ideal communism, there is this foolish belief that it will be a perfect utopia where everyone is happy).

Strangely enough, this is almost identical to another form of government known commonly by a different name, but which saw itself as socialism. Specifically I’m thinking of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), of course known more commonly by the abbreviation, Nazi. But what exactly is the difference? Control of the economy? Check. Control of social order? Check. Slave labor? Check. Death camps. Check. Power of an unelected elite, no rule of law, state sponsored atheism*, no protection of natural rights.

That about sums it up. But I’m always open to being proven wrong…How in any practical way is communism different from fascism or from what socialist say they want?

Check, check, check, and check. You know what the difference is between Fascism and Communism? It’s not in the type of government you have, it’s in the propaganda. Communism promises you a utopia where everyone is equal because they have done away with class, and every terrible act is justified to accomplish this greater good. Fascism is completely different in every way. Fascism promises you a utopia where everyone is equal because they have done away with everyone from a different heritage, and every terrible act is justified to accomplish this greater good.

There’s also a type of fascism that replaces race with religion, but most religions don’t work well with this because most religions argue that the human soul is divine, hence it works against fascist/communist principles that glorify only the whole and degrade the individual. In fact I can think of only one traditional religion that denies the divinity of the human soul and requires you to submit absolutely to the will of God.

Now I guess you could have something really bad which uses the racism of fascism and the class warfare of communism, and the religious overtones of Islamofascism, in one…oh wait, we do have that, it’s called North Korea. Otherwise known as the worst place on Earth.

There isn’t any practical difference between Communism in practice, Socialism in theory, and Fascism. They have the same means, the same methods, the same procedures. And they all have the same result. Suffering. Mountains and mountains of suffering. So, yes, calling someone by all three names is correct because all of them boil down to the lack of liberty in the name of the greater good.

‘But, but, but,’ I can hear the leftist whine now, ‘fascism is ultra-right not ultra-left.’ Okay, one, join the 21st century, the single axis right-left thing has been replaced by two and three axis plots of political leanings…and on those communism and fascism are pretty close to each other. The only reason some original idiot put fascism on the right was because they equated the love of country of the right wing America and Britain (which was based on the ideals of the nation) with the love of nation seen in fascism (which was based on things like race and ethnicity, you know the exact opposite of ideals). So let’s chalk up another moment in idiocy for political scientists.

Yes maybe one country listed as a 67 by the Heritage scale of economic freedom isn’t doing as well as one rated as 57, and maybe one country did better one year even though its numbers dropped a little in that year, but as I said there are a lot of other factors that effect this or that individual nation but overall, every country does better the more economic liberty it has. So when socialists try to tell you about the joys of the mixed economy, point out that actually those benefits are what comes from capitalism not the socialist aspects of the mixed economy.

Yes, I do know what those words mean. Now it would take a whole other blog to PROVE that Obama’s attacks on the free market and natural rights qualified him for those appellations, but I trust your common sense to make the prima facie case on your own, because I think it’s fair to say that every action he has taken over the last 5 years has moved us away from the benefits of capitalism and more and more toward the economic nightmares of socialism/communism/fascism. The only real question is, is it intentional or just gross idiocy?